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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "internet"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Thu, 8 Dec 2016 10:40:00 PSTMark Cuban Falsely Tells Congress AT&T's Latest Mega-Merger Will Be Really Wonderful For ConsumersKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161207/11265836221/mark-cuban-falsely-tells-congress-ats-latest-mega-merger-will-be-really-wonderful-consumers.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161207/11265836221/mark-cuban-falsely-tells-congress-ats-latest-mega-merger-will-be-really-wonderful-consumers.shtmlannounced that it planned to shell out $100 billion to acquire Time Warner. That comes on the heels of the company spending $70 billion to acquire DirecTV. Why is AT&T spending countless billions on content and a legacy satellite TV provider when the lion's share of the company's broadband network desperately needs upgrading? Because fixed and wireless broadband subscriber growth has slowed, and telco executives believe they need to turn to content and advertising (read: slinging videos at Millennials) to please investors.

Under fire for the anti-competitive repercussions of its latest deal, AT&T testified this week before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights. As you might expect, AT&T and Time Warner both breathlessly insist that there are absolutely no downsides to the companies' merger, adding the deal would be an incredible boon to consumers and the video market alike:

“By joining forces, we will accelerate the development and delivery of the next generation of video services that provide consumers with greater choice, convenience, value, and affordability,” Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told lawmakers in prepared testimony.

The problem is that's not really true. Most streaming providers are worried that AT&T, which just launched its new "DirecTV Now" streaming service, will make it harder than ever for streaming competitors to license the content (HBO, etc.) they need to compete. Similarly, many (including the outgoing FCC) are concerned that AT&T's decision to zero rate this DirecTV Now content (exempting AT&T's content from usage caps while still penalizing competitors) twists and distorts the open market. AT&T already effectively eliminated a TV market competitor when it acquired DirecTV. Now it's tilting the playing field unfairly in its favor.

These concerns received fleeting lip service at this week's hearing. Instead, the committee spent a significant amount of time listening to folks like Mark Cuban, who attended the hearing to lavish praise on AT&T's latest mega-merger:

“We need more companies ... with the ability to compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Delivering content to consumers in this app-driven world is not easy, it is very expensive and difficult. ... Alone, it will be very difficult, if not impossible for either AT&T or Time Warner to compete with any of the companies I've mentioned. Together it will still be difficult, but a combined entity at least gives them a chance to battle the dominant players in the marketplace and increase consumer choice and competition for consumer attention."

So one, AT&T is a massive telecom conglomerate that not only owns its own core and last mammoth nationwide network, but also is already the biggest TV provider in the country after its DirecTV acquisition. This scale provides AT&T immeasurable benefits in content negotiations, and the idea that it was in any way difficult for AT&T to compete in this space is laughable. That's before you even mention AT&T's incredible and often comedic lobbying influence on state and federal telecom and media policy. A helpless little daisy, AT&T is not.

And while DirecTV Now might bring some added streaming competition to the space, it's not like Apple, YouTube, Hulu, Sling TV, Sony, HBO and countless other companies aren't flooding into the streaming video space as well. The competition is already coming to this market. Another mega-merger doesn't help this competition, it actively harms it. AT&T is a company with a long, rich history of anti-competitive behavior and defrauding its own customers on multiple occasions. That it will use this expanded size and power in an anti-competitive fashion isn't theoretical. This is what AT&T does.

But zero rating is complicated. Understanding the perils of vertical integration and the threat of one company owning the content and the conduit is difficult. Realizing that AT&T all but owns state and federal government is inconvenient. As such, Cuban tried to trot out a somewhat bizarre little story in which he argues that the AT&T merger would be really wonderful for joe, beer-drinkin' consumer, because, uh, algorithms:

"I would also like to point out one other important element of consumer choice that an AT&T and Time Warner merger would improve.

Each of the largest content companies I have mentioned so far, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple present much if not all of their content algorithmically. As a Facebook user I don’t get to pick what content I get to see in my newsfeed. I can try to influence it, but Facebook algorithms control what I see.

In the future, it won’t be algorithms that choose what we see, our choices will be driven by some form of Artificial Intelligence learning from trillions of disparate inputs.

Meanwhile, for those of us who still enjoy our TV the old-fashioned way, on our couch, cold beverage in one hand and remote in the other, there is a lot to be said for having a company that can afford to continue to offer us that choice. As much of a geek as I am, I like having the choice of searching through a programming guide to see what’s on rather than an algorithm telling me what I should watch. I think a lot of consumers would like to see that choice continue as well."

So one, that entire story makes no goddamned sense. Because Apple, Google and Facebook use algorithms in their news feeds, it's a good idea to let a company with a massive history of anti-competitive behavior grow immeasurably larger? AT&T somehow will provide us with purer access to programming guides free of the nefarious influence of Silicon Valley artificial intelligence? That's so illogical I can't even deconstruct the point Cuban's trying to make. It's like arguing that forest fires are good because pineapples exist.

Granted we've noted a few times that while Cuban has a solid grasp of a number of issues, net neutrality, telecom and media issues aren't among them. As such, he should probably be the last person testifying on the subject before Congress. In fact in writing this piece, I stumbled upon something I wrote for Techdirt back in 2014 when (again) trying to highlight that Cuban doesn't really understand net neutrality:

"Of course Cuban has already made his fortune. Were we to take 1995 Mark Cuban (who was busy building Broadcast.com) and transplant his business into the modern era under AT&T, Verizon and Comcast -- you can be damn sure he'd be taking a very different approach to these issues. Cuban has spent a decade making it abundantly clear he doesn't understand net neutrality, the telecom market or the potential pitfalls of these new cap exempt business models. Perhaps we should put Mark Cuban, Donald Trump and all the rest of the billionaires with plenty to say but little actual understanding in charge of the telecom industry. At least we'd get some entertainment value out of the equation while the Internet burns.

Clearly I opened a portal to another dystopian dimension, and for that I'm truly sorry.

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]]>you're-not-helpinghttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20161207/11265836221Wed, 30 Nov 2016 03:24:38 PSTRussia Draws On Chinese Expertise And Technology To Clamp Down On Internet Users Even MoreGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161129/09210136150/russia-draws-chinese-expertise-technology-to-clamp-down-internet-users-even-more.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161129/09210136150/russia-draws-chinese-expertise-technology-to-clamp-down-internet-users-even-more.shtml
There seems to be some kind of unspoken competition between Russia and China to see who can clamp down on the Internet the most. Techdirt readers might like to offer their own views in the comments as to who is winning that unlovely race. But the days of repressive rivalry are drawing to a close; according to this article in the Guardian, Russia has decided that it would be much simpler to borrow some of China's ideas:

Russia has been working on incorporating elements of China's Great Firewall into the "Red Web", the country's system of internet filtering and control, after unprecedented cyber collaboration between the countries.

Just as important as the ideas is the actual technology:

The Russians apparently see no other option than to invite Chinese heavyweights into the heart of its IT strategy. "China remains our only serious 'ally', including in the IT sector," said a source in the Russian information technology industry, adding that despite hopes that Russian manufacturers would fill the void created by sanctions "we are in fact actively switching to Chinese".

That Russian source is clearly trying to suggest that this new partnership is all the fault of the West for imposing those silly economic sanctions, and that this could have been avoided if everybody had stayed friends. But the coziness between Russia and China has been coming for a while, as their geopolitical ambitions align increasingly, so the collaboration over surveillance and censorship technologies would probably have happened anyway. The interesting question is how the new alliance might blossom if the future Trump administration starts to reduce its engagement with the international scene to concentrate on domestic matters. The new Sino-Russian digital partnership could be just the start of something much bigger, but probably not more beautiful.

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]]>this-could-be-the-start-of-something-big-but-not-so-beautifulhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20161129/09210136150Fri, 4 Nov 2016 06:18:54 PDTWhy Is Your Bigoted, Luddite Uncle Crafting Internet Policy In Europe?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161103/17540835964/why-is-your-bigoted-luddite-uncle-crafting-internet-policy-europe.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161103/17540835964/why-is-your-bigoted-luddite-uncle-crafting-internet-policy-europe.shtmlridiculous copyright policy come out of the EU Commission. The whole thing seemed like a really bad joke. It was a law basically designed to destroy entrepreneurship and startups on the internet, and to basically forcibly take money from large internet companies and give them to failing legacy media companies that had refused to innovate. It seemed to go against what basically everyone (other than those legacy companies) had been telling the European Commission. And it seemed to directly violate what the European Commission itself had said about its plans. The inclusion of things like forcing any company to install filters, the plans to require specific business models at the regulatory level, and the idea that sites should have to pay those they link to are all ridiculous.

What almost everyone involved in the process made clear, was that this whole thing was driven by one guy: Gunther Oettinger a former tax lawyer who was appointed the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society a few years ago, despite the fact that he's not a fan of the internet at all. If you pay any attention at all to EU politics, you may have heard the name Gunther Oettinger quite a bit lately. That's because he got caught making a series of remarks that were bigoted, racist, sexist and homophobic (he hit basically everything). He made fun of the Chinese, using racist terminology. He made fun of women in the government. He mocked gay marriage. He was on quite a roll.

Gunther Oettinger: Everything has been said. There is nothing to apologise for.

Euroactiv's James Crisp: But there is a big scandal.

Oettinger: There is no scandal.

Of course, as more and more publications around the globe started talking about it he finally was forced to release a statement with a carefully worded apology:

I had time to reflect on my speech, and I can now see that the words I used have created bad feelings and may even have hurt people. This was not my intention and I would like to apologise for any remark that was not as respectful as it should have been.

Of course, at this time, Politico has also released a big profile on what they refer to as Oettinger's "strange career." The article notes that this little bigoted outburst is not a surprise and considered no big deal to his supporters -- a columnist from his hometown describes it as "That’s just how our Oetti is," in the same way you brush off your annoying bigot of an uncle at family gatherings with his horrible opinions. Except this bigoted uncle is setting serious policy issues across Europe -- and ones that can have a major, major impact on the internet and freedom of expression, despite an almost ridiculous ignorance of technology -- something he almost seems to take glee in not caring about.

From the article:

Back in 2014, Brussels didn’t have high hopes for him when he shifted from energy to take over the digital economy portfolio. He could be curt, tearing up his notes if he deemed a subject unworthy of his attention. In the often pretentious world of Brussels officialdom, he came across as unintellectual and unserious — more likely to obsess over cars or football than trade deals or European Union directives.

To make matters worse, as a die-hard Luddite, he seemed uniquely unqualified for his new position. His more tech-savvy boss, Commission Vice President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, was at ease on social media or on the trendiest apps, like Pokemon Go.

Oettinger, as he told the crowd at his now-infamous Hamburg speech last week, preferred an old-fashioned newspaper to Twitter and document printouts to a tablet or iPhone. As he settled into his office, his aides rushed to install a computer and carry away piles of paper stacked precariously on every available surface.

In the 22 months since his appointment, Oettinger has changed little. He continues to express more interest in breakthroughs in the automotive industry than the more abstract areas of his portfolio, such as data flows or ICT standards. His home in Brussels, he told a group of reporters and tech lobbyists recently, is not set up for Wi-Fi — something he attributes to his long hours at the office. At home, he prefers “a nice bottle of Bordeaux” to a broadband connection, he added.

And yet... he's the guy in charge of crafting digital/internet and copyright policy in the EU. How does this make any sense at all? Now, there's something to be said for sometimes having an outsider's view on things, and no one's arguing that he needs to come from the internet industry or anything like that. But Oettinger not only seems to not understand and not care about the internet, but he also seems to have no problem playing political favoritism with old legacy industries where he has friends -- especially industries who have been impacted by innovation and failed to embrace the internet.

While Ansip has struggled to push forward his ambitious agenda centered around breaking down digital barriers, often referred to as geo-blocking, Oettinger has used his negotiating skills to deliver for his allies in industry, like the German publishing sector, a series of high-profile victories.

During the summer, he strong-armed his way into negotiations on boosting European startups, infuriating his more innovation-focused colleagues. Before that, he bulldozed past Vodafone to accept a plan that would keep some power over German copper network cables in the hands of giant Deutsche Telekom.

So we're left with your nutty, bigoted, luddite uncle... and put him effectively in charge of making policy choices that will impact the entire internet, and no one seems to care that he's more focused on delivering favors to his friends in the old, legacy industries that failed to adapt.

Doesn't that seem like a problem?

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]]>seems-like-a-problemhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20161103/17540835964Thu, 3 Nov 2016 08:32:00 PDTIsraeli Lawmakers Pushing Mandatory, Default ISP Porn Filtering Because That Always Works So WellTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161102/11091635948/israeli-lawmakers-pushing-mandatory-default-isp-porn-filtering-because-that-always-works-so-well.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161102/11091635948/israeli-lawmakers-pushing-mandatory-default-isp-porn-filtering-because-that-always-works-so-well.shtml
It looks like Israel wants to take a UK-esque approach to internet porn. The Israeli government is considering mandating site blocking at the ISP level, rather than allowing end users to make their own decisions, as Quartz's Anaya Bhattacharya reports:

On Oct. 30, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation unanimously green-lit a bill that would force internet companies to censor pornography by default. The committee approved the measure in a bid to clamp down on rampant underage access to adult content online, the Times of Israel reported.

“The damaging influence of watching, and addiction to, pornographic and severe violence has been proven in many studies, with great harm to children. Today, it is easier for a child to consume harsh content on the internet than to buy an ice cream at the local kiosk,” said Moalem-Refaeli. “We must prevent such access by making the default of the internet provider to filter such content, unless the customer has asked to be exposed to it,” she added.

So, because internet porn is easier to access than ice cream, ISPs may be forced to stop allowing ice cream to flow uninterrupted through its lines unless customers of age specifically ask to be "exposed to" ice cream. If customers want porn to burst from every digital orifice connected to their ISP, they would need to opt-in via phone call, letter, or through the ISP's website.

Other people, who would just like to have their access to websites less effed up will also have to do the same, considering website filtering/blocking is far from perfect and tends to net a bunch of false positives. Critics of the bill only have to point to all the other times this has happened to provide examples of why this is a bad idea.

In addition, a list of opt-in users would be created because there's no way an opt-in "service" doesn't. I can't imagine why the government might be interested in the contents of such a list, but the fact that it's there means it could be obtained without too much paperwork if "needed." Then there are other outside forces, like malicious hackers, who might find it entertaining to plaster lists of "porn, please!" users all over the internet.

Less damaging to internet users' privacy would be a more voluntary system that allows users to request porn filtering and site blocking, rather than make this the default. But all of these issues are ignored when legislators engage in "for the children" legislation. Simple niceties like an open internet and user privacy are no match for impassioned pleas for all the ice cream-eating 8-year-olds of [insert nation here].

That all came to a head this morning when large chunks of the internet went down for about two hours, thanks to a massive DDoS attack targeting managed DNS provider Dyn. Most of the down sites are back (I'm still having trouble reaching Twitter), but it was pretty widespread, and lots of big name sites all went down. Just check out this screenshot from Downdetector showing the outages on a bunch of sites:

You'll see not all of them have downtime (and the big ISPs, as always, show lots of complaints about downtimes), but a ton of those sites show a giant spike in downtime for a few hours.

So, once again, we'd like to point out that this is as problem that the internet community needs to start solving now. There's been a theoretical threat for a while, but it's no longer so theoretical. Yes, some people point out that this is a difficult thing to deal with. If you're pointing people to websites, even if we were to move to a more distributed system, there are almost always some kinds of chokepoints, and those with malicious intent will always, eventually, target those chokepoints. But there has to be a better way -- because if there isn't, this kind of thing is going to become a lot worse.

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]]>this-is-no-longer-theoreticalhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20161021/09440935851Fri, 30 Sep 2016 12:55:31 PDTBorder Patrol Agent Caught Watching Porn On The Job Blames The Internet Filter For Not Stopping HimTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160928/06330635648/border-patrol-agent-caught-watching-porn-job-blames-internet-filter-not-stopping-him.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160928/06330635648/border-patrol-agent-caught-watching-porn-job-blames-internet-filter-not-stopping-him.shtml
We talk about porn filters occasionally here at Techdirt. Usually those discussions revolve around how useless and easily circumvented those filters are, even as the more clueless in government insist that we need more of this non-filtering filtering. This is not one of those stories. Instead, it is the story of one of the most tone-deaf individuals with a penchant for excuse-making I've ever come across.

We start with Gizmodo, a website that used to be owned by Gawker Media until a rich guy decided to show America exactly what a rich guy with a lot of money could do and had Gawker shut down, presumably then diving into a pile of gold coins and rubbing hundred dollar bills on his nipples. Gizmodo recently filed an FOIA request to get at documents involving the misuse of computer equipment with the Department of Homeland Security. The site was hoping to see if there were any cases of overreach and abuse of technology by the department. Instead, it uncovered four cases of people watching porn, including one really special case involving a border patrol agent that simply would not stop looking at porn while on the job.

According to the report obtained by Gizmodo, this particular case, where names have been redacted to protect the privacy of the agent, involves thousands of attempts to access porn on government computers in 2015.

The government says the unnamed agent tried to access porn 644 times in just a two-day span in July of 2015. The DHS internet software filters denied him access 467 times during those two days. Some of the porn was accessed simply because it was hosted on sites that weren’t recognized as exclusively for porn, like Flickr and Tumblr.

644 instances of watching porn while at work is the kind of dedication one likes to see out of an employee actually doing his or her job. That kind of relentless drive to jacking it while on the clock, however, isn't generally smiled upon. An investigation was conducted, which included an interview with the man caught loving himself. The agent had an excuse, however, and it's glorious.

He said that he knew he shouldn’t have been accessing porn at work, but that part of the blame was really with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office for not having “adequate web filters.”

Just drink that in for a moment. A border agent, part of an organization that is essentially a filter for those traveling across our borders, has said that part of the blame for his constant porn-viewing rests with the fact that the internet filter used didn't do a good enough job blocking his attempts to look at pornographic material. One immediately wonders if this excuse might be ported to the analog world of illegal immigration. Should an illegal immigrant caught by INS be able to simply shrug and say the blame for his or her illegal entry is really on the CBP for not stopping them? One might even imagine a caught illegal immigrant suggesting that CBP agents clearly didn't mind their entry if they spent so much time watching porn rather than, you know, catching those attempting to illegally cross the border. After all, if the filter isn't catching them, let's just blame that, right?

Are porn filters easily circumvented? Yes. Is that to blame for a CBP agent trying to find porn at work at a rate of near Olympic proportions? Mmm, no.

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]]>nice-excuse-you-have-therehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160928/06330635648Mon, 26 Sep 2016 10:40:00 PDTNew California Law Attempts To Fight Hollywood Ageism By Censoring Third-Party WebsitesTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160925/08515535616/new-california-law-attempts-to-fight-hollywood-ageism-censoring-third-party-websites.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160925/08515535616/new-california-law-attempts-to-fight-hollywood-ageism-censoring-third-party-websites.shtml
Actress Junie Hoang may have lost her legal battle against IMDb for revealing her age, but the California Assembly is ensuring she'll win the war. Hoang sued IMDb for $1 million, claiming the publication of facts without her permission had resulted in her being a victim of Hollywood ageism. IMDb won the lawsuit, but Governor Jerry Brown has just signed a bill into law that will prevent sites like IMDb from publishing actors' ages.

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday signed legislation that requires certain entertainment sites, such as IMDb, to remove – or not post in the first place – an actor’s age or birthday upon request.

The law, which becomes effective January 1, applies to database sites that allow paid subscribers to post resumes, headshots or other information for prospective employers. Only a paying subscriber can make a removal or non-publication request. Although the legislation may be most critical for actors, it applies to all entertainment job categories.

Quotes from actors' guild representatives and "industry leaders" present this as a positive change. Supposedly the removal of this information will result in fewer actors and actresses from being passed over for roles because they're "too old." Ageism may be an industry-wide problem but the correct solution would be to change Hollywood culture, not tap dance across the First Amendment.

“We are disappointed that AB 1687 was signed into law today,” said Internet Association spokesman Noah Theran. “We remain concerned with the bill and the precedent it will set of suppressing factual information on the internet.”

“Requiring the removal of factually accurate age information across websites suppresses free speech,” Beckerman wrote. “This is not a question of preventing salacious rumors; rather it is about the right to present basic facts that live in the public domain. Displaying such information isn’t a form of discrimination, and internet companies should not be punished for how people use public data.”

That's the problem with this law: it shoots the messenger rather than addresses the underlying problem. The government as a whole has passed many laws aimed at reducing discrimination, but in this case, the California assembly decided the onus should be on data aggregators that have absolutely nothing to do with the process of casting films.

It's unlikely this law will survive a Constitutional challenge, seeing as it prohibits the publication of facts. While any website can voluntarily choose to withhold this information, adding the government into the equation makes it a form of censorship.

The crafters of this law are claiming this speech suppression will benefit the little guy (and girl) the most:

[California Assemblyman Ian] Calderon said the law was more for actors and actresses not as well known as big stars.

“While age information for Hollywood’s biggest stars is readily available from other online sources, this bill is aimed at protecting lesser known actors and actresses competing for smaller roles,” Calderon said in the release. “These actors should not be excluded from auditioning simply based on their age.”

Calderon is correct. Actors should not be excluded simply because of their age. But that's a problem studios need to solve. And if they can't and legislators like himself still feel compelled to step in, the law should target discriminatory hiring practices, not IMDb and other sites like it.

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]]>way-to-solve-the-problem,-jackasseshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160925/08515535616Mon, 26 Sep 2016 09:36:00 PDTTraffic Is Fake, Audience Numbers Are Garbage, And Nobody Knows How Many People See AnythingLeigh Beadonhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160915/18183535533/traffic-is-fake-audience-numbers-are-garbage-nobody-knows-how-many-people-see-anything.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160915/18183535533/traffic-is-fake-audience-numbers-are-garbage-nobody-knows-how-many-people-see-anything.shtml
How many living, breathing human beings really read Techdirt? The truth — the most basic, rarely-spoken truth — is that we have no earthly idea. With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says "a million people" saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? I don't know, and neither do you. (Netflix might, but we'll get to that later.)

Where should we start? How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone's known it for years, but there's no incentive to actually acknowledge it. The situation is technically improving: 2015 was hailed (quietly, among people who aren't in charge of selling advertising) as a banner year because humans took back the majority with a stunning 51.5% share of online traffic, so hurray for that I guess. All the analytics suites, the ad networks and the tracking pixels can try as they might to filter the rest out, and there's plenty of advice on the endless Sisyphean task of helping them do so, but considering at least half of all that bot traffic comes from bots that fall into the "malicious" or at least "unauthorized" category, and thus have every incentive to subvert the mostly-voluntary systems that are our first line of defence against bots... Well, good luck. We already know that Alexa rankings are garbage, but what does this say about even the internal numbers that sites use to sell ad space? Could they even be off by a factor of 10? I don't know, and neither do you. Hell, we don't even know how accurate the 51.5% figure is — it could be way off... in either direction.

Okay, so what about TV ratings? Well, there's a reason they've been made fun of on the shows themselves for as long as our culture has been able to handle "meta" jokes without getting a headache. Nielsen ratings in their classic form are built on monitoring such a tiny sample of households that the whole country's viewing profile can probably be swayed because someone forgot to turn off the TV before going on vacation. They sucked before DVRs and digital distribution began transforming the single household television into a quaint anachronism, and now it's just chaos. Nielsen was slow to catch up with DVRs, and now the TV industry juggles scattered measurements including three or seven days of viewing beyond live air, and constantly complains that the ratings are off — specifically, that they're too low. And they might be right, in the sense that they are too low by comparison to the garbage ratings from the pre-digital age that everyone eventually embraced as a standard for relative rankings. How big are these audiences really, in terms of real living breathing human beings? I don't know, and neither do you.

YouTube view counts? Subject to all the same fake internet traffic problems, plus the fact that there's an opaque system for supposedly ignoring too-short incomplete views according to the genre and nature of the video, but good luck finding out how accurate that is. Channel operators know their length-of-view statistics, but you don't see them bandying them about much. Plus, how often have you heard public view counts casually referred to as the number of "people" who watched something, even though (especially when it comes to short-and-cute viral animal hits and their ilk) the bulk of them probably come from obsessive re-watching? Yeah.

So what about Facebook stats? Everything from impressions to simultaneous live video viewers is padded out by the most transient of idly-scrolling-through-the-newsfeed interactions. Twitter followings and tweet stats? Dig into the bowels of any list of followers, or any trending link, and see how much of it is mindless bots. Print readerships? Don't even get me started. Did you know it's common practice for newspapers to calculate their readership by applying a multiplier to their actual circulation, to account for an imaginary surplus of "readers per copy"? Yes, that soggy "local" paper that's been sitting out in the rain on your porch for two days, and that only exists to give them an excuse to deliver flyers to your door, is not only being counted — it's probably being counted five times. So are all the free/cheap copies that big national papers give to hotels. Oh, and when these companies distribute multiple publications in different channels — with newspapers, magazines and paywalled websites all being given away with each other as free cross-subscriptions, in order to pad out all three subscriber numbers — they add them all up and then try to determine the actual number of individual people they are reaching. How? By applying an opaque "deduplication" formula. I once pressed a newspaper's stats person about what this formula could possibly entail, but details were not forthcoming — because I suspect they just knock off 20% and call it a day, despite the fact that the magazine is distributed inside the newspaper whose audience they are supposedly "deduplicating" it from, and half the website subscriptions were free add-ons with print delivery. That's awfully generous when the truth is they don't know, and neither do I, and neither do you.

So who does know how big of an audience they really have? Well, maybe Netflix, Amazon and other digital subscription services. Their paywalls insulate them from the bulk of random bot traffic, and their proprietary ecosystems give them the ability to closely monitor all activity. Netflix, of course, is famously secretive about viewer numbers and insists on the inaccuracy of those who claim to have worked them out. The most common assumption is that they do this to avoid giving content creators too much leverage, and because the data can be seen as a valuable commodity — but I propose another reason: Netflix's likely-more-accurate statistics, if made public, would have zero context in the topsy-turvy world of nonsense TV ratings. They would probably look exceptionally low, giving the legacy bosses who would like nothing more than to downplay the importance of digital distribution (and there are as many of those as there are record execs who can't spell mp3) a chance to project whatever narrative they wanted onto the numbers.

So why does any of this matter? Because advertising is a multibillion dollar industry, and whenever an industry is worth that much, you have to ask: is that because there are billions of dollars of worthwhile transactions happening, or because every bloodsucker in a ten-industry radius wanted in on the action? So, so much of the advertising industry is pure waste. How much exactly is as impossible to determine as the audience sizes themselves. This is hardly a new idea (in fact it's a century-old quote) but it's probably more true now than ever, despite the fact that in theory technology could have delivered us from uncertainty.

Finally, what can be done about this? There's no simple answer, and maybe no answer at all. Here at Techdirt, we've been working to come up with good advertising solutions by focusing almost entirely on what we know our community likes and might be interested in (as in, our real community of people who talk in our comments and we can say, with confidence, exist) and paying less attention to raw numbers — both a luxury and a necessity for a smaller publication, depending on how you look at it. That's not always easy though, as we face an advertising industry ruled by metrics, where there are often ten spreadsheet-wielding interns between us and someone who might actually care about our creativity. In our experiments with more traditional algorithmic display advertising to monetize the raw traffic numbers we do have, we keep running up against what appears to be a universal truth: the bulk of the global internet ad ecosystem runs on trash. Gigantic prestigious online media brands can sell display campaigns straight to the same people who buy Superbowl ads — everyone else receives a hundred pitches a week from new ad networks that claim to deliver great, relevant content but in fact litter your site with ads for fad diets and ambulance-chasers (at best). And this lowest-common-denominator filler appears to be the only reliably successful form of internet advertising! At least, it never goes away when the good stuff does, and the proud quality networks eventually embrace their roles as crap-peddlers. "Good" internet advertising is a rickety ship navigating an endless roiling ocean of spam, clickbait and outright fraud — but it couldn't float at all without it.

I realize I've painted a grim picture, but these are (more or less) the facts. I'm surely wrong in some of my guesses, but like everything discussed here, nobody knows how wrong or in which direction. We'll never even really know how many people read this — we'll just have a vague estimate that can be compared to other posts on Techdirt. But for now that's the reality, so maybe more people should stop worrying about the supposed size of their audience, and focus on making the content they want to make.

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]]>stabs-in-the-darkhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160915/18183535533Thu, 22 Sep 2016 11:41:55 PDTSenate Comes To Its Senses: Does NOT Support Ted Cruz's Plan To Block Internet Governance TransitionMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160922/11235435597/senate-comes-to-their-senses-does-not-include-ted-cruzs-plan-to-block-internet-governance-transition-funding-bill.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160922/11235435597/senate-comes-to-their-senses-does-not-include-ted-cruzs-plan-to-block-internet-governance-transition-funding-bill.shtmlabsolutely include Ted Cruz's preferred language that would block the (largely symbolic, but really important) transfer of control over the IANA functions of ICANN away from the Commerce Department. We've explained over and over and over again why this is important -- including once this morning in response to Donald Trump suddenly taking a stand (an incredibly ignorant one, but a stand) on the issue.

And then... poof. The Senate Appropriations Committee released its "short term continuing resolution" (CR for short) and it does not include any language on blocking the IANA transition. So... all the talk and (misleading) hype was apparently a bunch of grandstanding and hot air over nothing. It may have just been posturing and used to negotiate something else. Or, maybe (just maybe) people who actually understood what was happening with the IANA transition were actually able to explain to those in charge how stupid all this rhetoric was. That would certainly be a nice explanation for this -- though it seems tragically unlikely.

But, for the short term, this means a very dangerous thing for the internet, pushed for by Ted Cruz (and, as of yesterday, Donald Trump) has been avoided. It's possible that the House could try to somehow move to block the transition, but that seems unlikely. So, we may have actually won one here and narrowly avoided political grandstanding mucking up a piece of the internet. Phew.

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]]>crisis-avertedhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160922/11235435597Tue, 20 Sep 2016 10:43:44 PDTItaly Proposes Law To Make Mocking People Online IllegalMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160919/17403635566/italy-proposes-law-to-make-mocking-people-online-illegal.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160919/17403635566/italy-proposes-law-to-make-mocking-people-online-illegal.shtmlone of the dumbest such laws in history, written so broadly that it will outlaw a lot more than the kind of "cyberbullying" it's supposedly intended to combat:

Under the proposed law, the "site manager" of Italian media, including bloggers, newspapers and social networks would be obliged to censor "mockery" based on "the personal and social condition" of the victim -- that is, anything the recipient felt was personally insulting. The penalty for failing to take action is a fine of €100,000. Truthfulness is not a defense in suits under this law -- the standard is personal insult, not falsehood.

Yes, mockery on the internet could get you a €100,000 fine. Mockery. The internet. The internet is made for mockery. And now is the time that everyone should be mocking this idiotic law -- and the politicians who proposed it without having the slightest idea of how such a thing would be abused all the time. As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing notes:

... what it will do is create a tool for easy censorship without due process or penalty for misuse. The standard proposed in the bill is merely that the person on the receiving end of the argument feel aggrieved. Think of the abuse of copyright takedowns: online hosts already receive millions of these, more than they could possibly evaluate, and so we have a robo-takedown regime that lets the rich and powerful routinely remove material that puts them in an unflattering light.

As bad as that is, at least it makes censorship contingent on something specific and objective: copyright infringement, which has a wealth of caselaw defining its contours. Indeed, so much that you need to be a trained expert to adjudicate a claim of infringement. But at least you can objectively assess whether a copyright infringement has taken place.

The standard set by the proposed Italian law allows for purely subjective claims to be made, and for enormous penalties to be imposed on those who question them before undertaking sweeping acts of censorship.

There are some efforts under way to "improve" the law by making it not quite so draconian, but maybe, just maybe, the "improvement" should be to recognize that you're never going to successfully outlaw mockery on the internet.

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]]>what-a-stupid-fucking-lawhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160919/17403635566Mon, 19 Sep 2016 21:41:50 PDTHow Pirates Shaped The Internet As We Know ItSasha Moss, R Streethttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160919/17184435565/how-pirates-shaped-internet-as-we-know-it.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160919/17184435565/how-pirates-shaped-internet-as-we-know-it.shtml
Today is "International Talk like a Pirate Day." While it's a lot of fun to act like a pirate, drink rum and catch up on Errol Flynn movies, piracy is also a serious issue with real economic and legal significance. As electronic devices become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our lives, the content we consume has moved from analog to digital. This has made copying – as well as pirating – increasingly easy and prevalent.

Adding fuel to the flames of this rising "pirate generation" has been the content industry's recalcitrant and often combative attitude toward digital markets. Piracy, and the reactions to it, has had an immense impact on the daily lives of ordinary Americans, shaping their digital experience by determining how they can share, transfer and consume content.

As soon as electronic storage and communication technology was sufficiently developed, digital piracy became accessible. Whether it's a song, movie, video game or other piece of software, you could suddenly reproduce it without having to steal it off a shelf or obtain any specialized machinery to counterfeit it. Additionally, if you wanted to listen to an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears album on your computer, there weren't many lawful options. This led to a surge in online piracy and helped foster a culture of online file-sharing.

The music industry historically has a reputation for being hostile to, or at least slow to embrace, digital markets. Yet there were also some major artists who were early innovators in the space.

Before Spotify or iTunes, there was BowieNet. This music-focused internet service provider launched in July 1998 and gave users 5MB of space to create and share their own websites, content and chat. On BowieNet, according to Ars Technica: "[f]ans could get access to unreleased music, artwork, live chats, first-in-line tickets, backstage access, tickets to private, fan club-only concerts." David Bowie saw the potential to help his fan base access his content and discuss it in a social way in the early days of the internet, before Facebook or Myspace. He remarked at the time: "If I was 19 again, I'd bypass music and go right to the internet."

Bowie wasn't the only early music pioneer of the internet. Prince was also an early unsung hero. In the early 2000s, he created NPG Music Group, later Lotusflow3r. He even won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Unlike BowieNet, NPG and later Lotusflow3r provided releases of full albums.

As musicians and users were experimenting with new ways to share content on the internet, the United States was working with other World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) member countries to create the most comprehensive "digital" update to the Copyright Act. In 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which implemented U.S. WIPO treaty obligations, as well as several other significant titles (including the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act – which pirates of the nautical variety might care about). Of particular importance were the sections providing for "safe harbor" (Sec. 512), which protected service providers from infringing content generated by their users, and "anti-circumvention" (Sec. 1201), which was meant to stop pirates from hacking digital rights management (DRM) and similar restriction technologies.

Unfortunately, while the system worked when isolated incidents of infringement occurred on largely static web pages—as was the case when the law was passed in 1998—it is largely useless in the current world where illegal links that are taken down reappear instantaneously. The result is a never-ending game that is both costly and increasingly pointless.

While lawmakers were hard at work trying to find ways to quell online piracy, the courts weren't taking a nap. Indeed, going back to the 1980s, there were important judicial fights that would set the stage for how content would be handled on our electronic devices.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Corp. of America v Universal City Studios Inc.decision coined what is known as "time shifting," referring to a user's ability to record a live show using the Betamax to watch it later. The court's decision set the precedent that a manufacturer would not be held liable for any contributory negligence or potential infringement where they did not have actual knowledge of infringement and their devices were sold for a legitimate, non-infringing purpose. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion:

One may search the Copyright Act in vain for any sign that the elected representatives of the millions of people who watch television every day have made it unlawful to copy a program for later viewing at home, or have enacted a flat prohibition against the sale of machines that make such copying possible. It may well be that Congress will take a fresh look at this new technology, just as it so often has examined other innovations in the past. But it is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America said in a congressional hearing two years prior [regarding VHS technology]:

We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would take another approach in 2000s A&M Records v Napster. The court affirmed the district court's ruling that peer-to-peer services could be held for contributory infringement and vicarious liability. Even though their service merely facilitated the exchange of music as an intermediary, they were on the hook. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote in the district court's ruling:

…virtually all Napster users engage in the unauthorized downloading or uploading of copyrighted music; as much as eighty-seven percent of the files available on Napster may be copyrighted, and more than seventy percent may be owned or administered by plaintiffs

Napster lodged several defenses, including fair use, but the most important (in lieu of the Sony decision) was the concept of "space-shifting," referring to the process of a user converting a compact disc recording to mp3 files, then using Napster to transfer the music to a different computer. Patel concluded Sony did not apply, because Napster retained control over their product, unlike Sony's Betamax, which was manufactured and sold, but not actively monitored.
The courts would continue ruling in a similar manner as other peer-to-peer services found themselves in the courtroom. At times, users would be targeted. And in the 2003 case of In re: Aimster, the pirates' bluntness for wanting to bring the music industry to its knees did not help the situation

What you have with Aimster is a way to share, copy, listen to, and basically in a nutshell break the law using files from other people's computers…. I suggest you accept aimster for what it is, an unrestricted music file sharing database – (posted by zhardoum, May 18, 2001)

Naturally with all of the music-sharing services were being shut down, the pirates found a new way to connect, share files and shape the industry. Which brings us to BitTorrent and websites like The Pirate Bay and Swepiracy. Torrenting does not require a central server, does not require direct streaming from one peer to another and the host does not contain any full file contents. All of the content received is from other users.

Sweden brought Pirate Bay to trial for both civil and criminal penalties. Per E. Samuelson, the site's attorney, lodged the now-famous (and familiar, for U.S. copyright scholars) King Kong defense:

EU directive 2000/31/EC says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don't initiate transfers. It's the users that do and they are physically identifiable people.

The defense was unsuccessful. Which brings many questions to mind for future cases — how will courts begin to rule with such complex systems of file transfer as fragmented torrents? Targeting users is widely unpopular, especially in the United States, where statutory penalties range from $750 to $300,000 per willful infringing use and $200 to $150,000 for non-willful infringement.

Efforts around the world have continually been made to combat piracy. But maybe it's time we take a fresh look at the market. As the Copia Institute observed in a recent report, whenever there are new ways to share content legally, users ultimately respond by employing those technologies.

On this International Talk like a Pirate Day, let's take a moment to remember the pirates and how they have helped shape the internet era. While CD sales and digital downloads may be declining, new streaming services are on the rise (vinyl records are also doing remarkably well). The digital revolution has, indeed, changed how we consume and access our music. It has given us access to (nearly) everything, through services like Spotify and Apple music, at a reasonable price and with unparalleled convenience.

From the consumer's perspective, you now carry hundreds of hours of music on your phone and listen to it whenever you want – no need for one of those bulky CD binders. The slot where the CD used to go in your car is now an auxiliary cable jack.

From an artist perspective's, these are new challenges that require adaptation. Particularly in the case of music licensing, our pre-existing laws are unnecessarily complex, cumbersome and antiquated. However, innovative technologies and services are not to blame. Instead, we should seek new and equally innovative ways for artists to be compensated through more direct and transparent payments (such as Ujo).

While our copyright laws are far from perfect, we still have substantial freedom to remix, repurpose and share creative content online in a social context. This is essential to online free expression, digital commerce and the proper functioning of the internet itself. As additional discussions in Congress and in the courts move forward, let's make sure we keep it that way.

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]]>talk-like-a-pirate-dayhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160919/17184435565Thu, 15 Sep 2016 08:23:00 PDTIf Someone Is Testing Ways To Take Down The Internet, Perhaps It's Time To Build A Stronger InternetMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160914/17401335522/if-someone-is-testing-ways-to-take-down-internet-perhaps-time-to-build-stronger-internet.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160914/17401335522/if-someone-is-testing-ways-to-take-down-internet-perhaps-time-to-build-stronger-internet.shtmlseries of tests that appear to be probing for ways to take down the entire internet. Basically, a bunch of critical infrastructure providers have noticed some interesting attacks on their systems that look like they're probing to determine defenses.

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing. They last longer. They're more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.

The attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what the company's total defenses are. There are many different ways to launch a DDoS attacks. The more attack vectors you employ simultaneously, the more different defenses the defender has to counter with. These companies are seeing more attacks using three or four different vectors. This means that the companies have to use everything they've got to defend themselves. They can't hold anything back. They're forced to demonstrate their defense capabilities for the attacker.

This article is getting a collective "oh, shit, that's bad" kind of reaction from many online -- and that's about right. But, shouldn't it also be something of a call to action to build a better system? In many ways, it's still incredible that the internet actually works. There are still elements that feel held together by duct tape and handshake agreements. And while it's been surprisingly resilient, that doesn't mean that it needs to remain that way.

Schneier notes that there's "nothing, really" that can be done about these tests -- and that's true in the short term. But it seems, to me, like it should be setting off alarm bells for people to rethink how the internet is built -- and to make things even more distributed and less subject to attacks on "critical infrastructure." People talk about how the internet was originally supposed to be designed to withstand a nuclear attack and keep working. But, the reality has always been that there are a few choke points. Seems like now would be a good time to start fixing things so that the choke points are no longer so critical.

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]]>let's get it donehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160914/17401335522Tue, 13 Sep 2016 16:20:22 PDTCuba's Telecom Monopoly Banning Text Messages Containing Words Like 'Democracy'Karl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160907/11140335461/cubas-telecom-monopoly-banning-text-messages-containing-words-like-democracy.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160907/11140335461/cubas-telecom-monopoly-banning-text-messages-containing-words-like-democracy.shtmlremoved the country from the agency's banned nation list. That allows fixed and wireless companies alike to begin doing business in Cuba as part of an overall attempt to ease tensions between the States and the island nation. And while Cuba has been justly concerned about opening the door to NSA bosom buddies like AT&T and Verizon, it's still apparently not quite ready to give up some of its own, decidedly ham-fisted attempts to crack down on free speech over telecom networks.

A recent investigative report by blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the nation has been banning certain words sent via text message with the help of state-owned telecom monopoly ETECSA. The report, confirmed in an additional investigation by Reuters, found that roughly 30 different keywords are being banned by Cuba's government, including "democracy," "human rights," and the name of several activists and human rights groups. Words containing such keywords simply aren't delivered, with no indication given to the sender of the delivery failure.

Initially, the researchers thought this was just incompetence on the part of ETECSA:

"Eliecer Avila, head of opposition youth group Somos Mas, which participated in the investigation, said 30 key words that triggered the blocking had been identified but there could be more.

"We always thought texts were vanishing because the provider is so incompetent, then we decided to check using words that bothered the government," he said. "We discovered not just us but the entire country is being censored," he said. "It just shows how insecure and paranoid the government is."

You can understand some degree of paranoia when you've got the United States and Russia battling over who gets to bone graft surveillance technology into your fledgling communications networks, but the clumsy censorship also isn't too surprising for a nation that still bans advertising across the island.

That said, the real problem for most Cubans remains that broadband and wireless communications is a luxury commodity well out of reach of most residents. Only between 5 and 25% of Cubans even have access to the internet, and while many can access Wi-Fi via hotspots opened just last year, the cost of connection is roughly $2 an hour, or around a tenth of the average monthly Cuban salary. As such, Cubans are "fortunate" in that they can't yet even afford to be comprehensively spied on.

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]]>that'll-workhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160907/11140335461Fri, 9 Sep 2016 11:49:53 PDTTed Cruz Still Blatantly Misrepresenting Internet Governance TransitionMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160909/00512835471/ted-cruz-still-blatantly-misrepresenting-internet-governance-transition.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160909/00512835471/ted-cruz-still-blatantly-misrepresenting-internet-governance-transition.shtmla good thing and not a big deal. You can read those two posts on it, but the really short version is twofold: (1) the Commerce Department's "control" over ICANN's IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) was always pretty much non-existent in the first place; and (2) even having that little connection to the US government, though, only provided tremendous fodder for foreign governments (mainly: Russia & China) to push to take control of the internet themselves. That's what that whole disastrous UN/ITU/WCIT mess was a few years back. Relinquishing the (non-existent) control, with clear parameters that internet governance wouldn't then be allowed to jump into the ITU's lap, helps on basically every point. It takes away a key reason that other countries have used to claim they need more control, and it makes it clear that internet governance needs to remain out of any particular government's control.

As we noted, this is all a good thing.

But for unclear reasons, Senator Ted Cruz keeps insisting that this "transfer" is about the US giving control over the internet to the UN. He's ramped up this rhetoric lately as the transition gets closer:

"Today our country faces a threat to the internet as we know it. In 22 short days, if Congress fails to act, the Obama administration intends to give away the internet to an international body akin to the United Nations," Cruz said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday. "I rise today to discuss the significant, irreparable damage this proposed internet giveaway could wreak not only on our nation but on free speech across the world."

Except that's hogwash. The plan does exactly the opposite. We've made this point over and over again, and thankfully others are doing so as well. Fusion has a long and detailed article that highlights that Cruz's claims are a fantasy and have no basis in reality. It goes through the whole history of IANA (if you don't know the story of Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds, and how the two of them basically kept the internet running in their spare time for a few decades, you should...), but then points out that Cruz is just wrong:

To be clear: ICANN has about as much control over the internet as Ted Cruz has a grasp on how DNS actually works–which is to say, very little. But the perpetuation of the fiction that ICANN controls the internet is representative of the completely understandable human impulse to try and assign control of the internet to someone or something, particularly in a time where the systems that shape most users’ experience of the internet are increasingly opaque and unaccountable to users.

Saying any one group controls the internet is as absurd as saying who “controls” capitalism or globalization itself. But everyone has their version of control. Silicon Valley billionaires may insist we surrender to the invisible hand of the network, which simply chooses disruption and convenience over accountability and ethics. For the federal government, it’s far easier to accuse the private sector of being in control and thwarting national security than admit that mass surveillance is an expensive and incompetent tactic. For critics (or those who’d prefer that control be in their hands), it would be far simpler to point at a single oligarch or Bohemian Club or ICANN that needs to be overthrown; it might redeem what today at times seems like a fractal trainwreck of an internet, and somehow bring us back to John Perry Barlow’s never-realized promise of an independent cyberspace.

And it also points out that the biggest "threat" to how internet governance is handled is if Cruz actually succeeds in blocking the transition:

Mostly, when I asked people at ICANN about worst-case scenarios with the transition, they pointed to Ted Cruz’s efforts. The transition not going through–either through a blocking action from this current Congress through some legislative action or Congress just delaying until the next president comes into office–would not only undermine the work that a lot of people have already put into the transition plan, it also would create even further mistrust and frustration among countries like Brazil that continue to be frustrated by US control. Maybe that would be enough to justify a fragmentation of the root zone. Or it could just make it harder for the multistakeholder model to function by undermining trust in the community as a whole, making consensus harder to achieve. Which is kind of to say it could start to look a lot more like the US Congress.

In other words, as we've explained before, Ted Cruz's concerns over the internet here are completely backwards. Up is down, black is white, night is day kind of stuff. Keeping the IANA connection to the US government is the kind of thing that opens up the possibility for Russia/China to exert more control over internet governance by routing around ICANN and its flawed, but better than the alternative, "multistakeholder" setup. Moving ICANN away from the US government, with strict rules in place that basically keep it operating as is, takes away one of the key arguments that foreign countries have been using to try to seize control over key governance aspects of the internet.

If Cruz fears foreign governments taking control of internet governance, he should do the exact opposite of what he's doing now. Let the Commerce Dept. sever the almost entirely imaginary leash it has on ICANN. Otherwise, other countries' frustration with the US's roles is a much bigger actual threat to how the internet is managed.

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]]>let-it-go,-tedhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160909/00512835471Fri, 2 Sep 2016 17:59:00 PDTBhutan's Gross National Unhappiness: In The Wake Of The Country's First Facebook Defamation Lawsuit, Fears Of Censorship RiseGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160901/07532335413/bhutans-gross-national-unhappiness-wake-countrys-first-facebook-defamation-lawsuit-fears-censorship-rise.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160901/07532335413/bhutans-gross-national-unhappiness-wake-countrys-first-facebook-defamation-lawsuit-fears-censorship-rise.shtml
The Kingdom of Bhutan is probably best known for its splendid location in the Himalayas, and for eschewing measurements of Gross Domestic Product in favor of Gross National Happiness. In the one Techdirt story so far about the nation, we also reported that Bhutan's government seemed to lack a sense of humor when it came to the Internet. Three years later, the online situation threatens to deteriorate further:

Bhutanese journalist Namgay Zam is facing defamation charges over a Facebook post, marking the first time that anyone in the Himalayan country has been taken to court over their social media activities.

As the detailed Global Voices post makes clear, this is a complicated story, involving not just journalists, but also senior judges and powerful business and political figures. The ramifications of this case are likely to be serious. Here's what the country's prime minister said, quoted on the Bhutanese Web site Kuensel Online:

As of now, Bhutanese are using social media in a sensible manner but often we come across news that takes an unhealthy trend. For that, we do have a social media policy coming into force where we have incorporated certain restrictions regarding what we can share on social media and what we can't share or what kind of news can come into the social media, among others.

It remains to be seen what that new policy will entail, and the extent of the censorship imposed. But it's sad to see a country that cares about maximizing national happiness taking precisely the same route as less enlightened nations.

MPs warned that social media websites are becoming the "vehicle of choice" for spreading terrorist propaganda but websites are policing billions of accounts and messages with just a "few hundred" employees.

I'm pretty sure giving terrorists free rein is more "damaging" to "brands" than the current status quo. Sure, chasing terrorists off the internet is just another form of whack-a-mole, but it's not as though these companies aren't trying. Facebook's policing of content tends to lean towards overzealous. Twitter just removed over 200,000 terrorist-related accounts. And as for Google, it's busy bending over backward for everyone, from copyright holders to a few dozen misguided governments. But the internet -- including terrorists -- perceives censorship as damage and quickly routes around it.

The argument can be made (and it's a pretty good argument) that it might be more useful to have terrorists chatting on open platforms where they can easily be monitored, rather than pushing them towards "darker" communications methods. But it's tough to reason with lawmakers who find big corporations to be the easiest targets for their displeasure.

And, really, their complaints are nothing more than a cheap form of class warfare, one that tacitly asks millions of non-terrorist internet users to sympathize with a government seeking to gain more control over the platforms they use.

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee, said: "Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion-dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror."

That's what the MPs are really seeking: a way to carve off a slice of these billion-dollar incomes. Vaz fears the "Wild West" internet (one filled with Middle Eastern desperadoes, apparently…) because it's "ungoverned" and "unregulated." If both of those "problems" are fixed, he'll presumably be able to sleep better -- perhaps warmed by the flow of a new revenue stream or soothed by an expansion of his government's powers. Either way, these companies should have to shoulder the blame for terrorism's continued existence.

Some might make the argument that the government isn't doing enough to fight terrorism. After all, "billions" of dollars go towards this battle every year, and every year nothing appears to change.

The report points specifically to the supposedly "low" number of employees policing posted content.

"It is alarming that these companies have teams of only a few hundred employees to monitor networks of billions of accounts..."

Apparently, these billion-dollar companies are expected to move towards a 1:1 ratio of moderators to users. Vaz also claims these companies need to take a "no questions asked" attitude towards law enforcement demands to have content taken down. If so, perhaps the UK government should start hiring more law enforcement officers and move the needle more towards a 1:1 ratio of constables to internetizens… or at least a 1:1 ratio of constables to platform content moderators.

The report also points to various "failures" within the UK government, suggesting anti-terrorism laws just aren't quite strict enough. It notes that police have allowed alleged terrorists to leave the country while on bail because they haven't seized their passports. And an official from Scotland Yard asserts -- with wording that suggests the UK doesn't have quite enough restraints on speech yet -- that existing laws can't shut down the sort of thing the report complains that Google, Facebook, and Twitter aren't shutting down quickly enough: namely, posts by Anjem Choudary, a "hate preacher" who was convicted of supporting the Islamic State.

Richard Walton, the former head of Scotland Yard's counter terrorism command, today warns that existing British laws would not prevent preachers who followed Choudary's example and acting as "radicalisers".

Obviously, the answer is MORE LAWS. That should fix it. That and blaming tech companies for third-party content, something they already police about as well as they can, considering the number of users on their respective platforms. It's always handy to have a scapegoat to beat like the dead horse these arguments are, especially when the scapegoat can mixed-metaphorically be portrayed as fat cats electro-fiddling while social media burns.

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]]>a raging hate-on, disguised as an official reporthttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160827/06252935364Thu, 18 Aug 2016 08:36:00 PDTRemember Claims That Cord Cutting Was On The Ropes? It's Actually Worse Than EverKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160818/05582635268/remember-claims-that-cord-cutting-was-ropes-actually-worse-than-ever.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160818/05582635268/remember-claims-that-cord-cutting-was-ropes-actually-worse-than-ever.shtmlnonexistent or overstated. Earlier this year, these voices were quick to argue that the industry had cord cutting on the ropes because several of the biggest cable providers saw modest subscriber gains in the fourth quarter (ignoring several that saw net subscriber losses for the year).

Those folks have been pretty damn quiet the last few weeks as second quarter earnings show cord cutting is worse than ever.

A new report by Leichtman Research notes that the pay TV industry collectively lost about 665,000 net video subscribers last quarter, a number some other analysts say was closer to 757,000. Dish Network alone lost 281,000 subscribers, while the new, larger Charter (after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks) lost 143,000 subscribers. "Phone" companies were hit particularly hard, telcos alone losing 500,000 subscribers in just one quarter. In fact, with AT&T and DirecTV now being one company, every single pay TV provider saw a net loss in TV subscribers during Q2:

It's kind of hard to spin this kind of bloodshed, so cord cutting denialists are likely to remain quiet -- at least for a few months.

Most analysts believe that these losses are due in large part to folks that are moving to a new home or apartment, and not bothering to sign back up for cable when they do. But if you factor in that these numbers aren't scaling alongside housing growth, things are even uglier than the numbers indicate. But because companies like Comcast occasionally see quarters with very modest subscriber gains (thanks in part to their monopoly over broadband and bundling), you'll still somehow see folks trying to argue that cord cutting is either non-existent or an over-hyped fad.

None of this is to say that cable providers couldn't quickly change the entire narrative by simply competing more seriously on TV service price (at the cost of higher broadband bills, of course). But instead, most cable sector executives still desperately cling to the narrative that cord cutting is a fad that stops once Millennials procreate. This is, they clearly believe, just a touch of cash cow indigestion that will magically resolve itself, so there's no reason to stop hitting consumers with biannual rate hikes for bloated bundles of unwatched channels.

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]]>numbers don't liehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160818/05582635268Wed, 17 Aug 2016 09:48:19 PDTDonald Trump Says He'll Turn Off The Internet For TerroristsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160816/17092135262/donald-trump-says-hell-turn-off-internet-terrorists.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160816/17092135262/donald-trump-says-hell-turn-off-internet-terrorists.shtmlfirst time he's said this, but on Monday, Presidential candidate Donald Trump once again insisted that part of his plan to "Make America Great Again" is to stop bad people from using the internet:

My Administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting. We cannot allow the internet to be used as a recruiting tool, and for other purposes, by our enemy – we must shut down their access to this form of communication, and we must do so immediately.

Almost no one covered this because everyone was focused on other stuff in the speech about his new "tests" for letting foreigners into the country. But this still remains a pretty big concern, in part because of just how technically clueless this is. Sure, we've seen some others suggest similarly dumb ideas, but no one seems to bother to think through how this might be done and what a mess it would create.

There's no way you can "disrupt" or block them from using the internet without also cutting off millions of innocent people -- many of whom almost certainly rely on the internet for all sorts of important things. And, on top of that, any solution would be of only limited effectiveness in the long run anyway. There are increasingly new ways and new paths to get online -- whether through wireless mesh networks or, eventually, from things like drones and satellites. Thinking that you can magically take an entire group of people off the internet is profoundly silly.

At the same time, as we've noted, the most ridiculous part in this idea that we should kick terrorists off the internet is the fact that the intelligence community has said that tracking what they're saying online has been tremendously beneficial in tracking terrorists, their views and their plans. Why would you want to cut off such a source of intelligence gathering?

The whole thing, like so much of this Presidential campaign, seems to be yet another example of a candidate saying what people want to hear with little to no thought about what it actually means, whether it would do any good or how to implement the plan.

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]]>uh,-how?https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160816/17092135262Wed, 27 Jul 2016 23:09:00 PDTHow The EU Might Keep Internet Access Open To The PublicCathy Sloanhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160727/18032235093/how-eu-might-keep-internet-access-open-to-public.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160727/18032235093/how-eu-might-keep-internet-access-open-to-public.shtml
A few weeks ago, the largest telecom ISPs issued a 5G Manifesto in which they
threatened not to invest in 5G wireless networks unless BEREC waters down its
guidelines for enforcement of open Internet access.

Fortunately for American consumers, startup entrepreneurs and small
businesses, the FCC was not swayed by similar ISP threats about how common
carrier law would kill network investment here. And so even with U.S. open
Internet law now firmly in place after a recent court decision, Verizon has
announced significant continued investment in 5G networks and field testing in
multiple locations.

But carriers in Europe, that don’t face competition from cable broadband
providers like American phone company ISPs do, enjoy even stronger market
dominance that allows them to intimidate regulators attempting to defend end
user rights. The current generation of online startups needs to be able to count
on the same open Internet connectivity that the most popular global platforms
enjoyed in their infancy a decade or two ago. Only now it’s a battle against
corporate lobbyists to get it.

In recognition of this opposition, over one hundred founders of European tech
companies and startups along with their international investors and trade groups
signed an open letter to underscore the critical importance of BEREC’s upcoming
action to innovation and job-creating growth in the digital economy. They made it
clear that if telecom ISPs are able to manipulate and subsidize data plan costs
for users of established big name platforms, they will put up new barriers to
online market entry. Earlier up front capital will be required in a “pay to play”
environment, and those entrepreneurs who can’t pay up will find it much harder
to be discovered online, scale up and compete for business. No such price of
admission ever held back American tech startups, although many of their
investors had grown very uneasy prior to the FCC’s decisive action in early 2015.

While BEREC has displayed a comprehensive understanding of real new threats
to open Internet access, several loopholes in the draft guidelines must be closed
if Europeans expect effective safeguards to protect their Internet access service
from commercial interference. Specifically ISPs should not be allowed to use the
“specialized services” exception to circumvent the ban on charging online content
and application providers for priority transmission on the public Internet.

Secondly, given provisions in the Regulation prohibiting discriminatory
commercial practices, BEREC should ban zero rating schemes that favor certain
online platforms by exempting them from data caps. Zero rating is as harmful to
startups and other competing platforms as technical network discrimination. Zero
rating of an ISP’s own content is particularly anticompetitive. Finally network
traffic management should be application-agnostic whenever possible. ISPs
should not favor some classes of traffic and delay others, such as encrypted
content, except under unusual circumstances.

Open Internet access law supports a digital innovation economy in which all
online content is equally accessible regardless of the identity of one’s ISP or its
business deals with online platforms. In the US, all zero rating is not banned, but
the FCC is actively investigating sponsored data and zero rating plans for
compliance with its open Internet order. In response to the EU Regulation, the
Netherlands already has banned zero rating.

All ISPs have a natural economic incentive to partner with or acquire popular
content providers in order to maximize monetization of their network facilities. As
a practical matter, only the big ones like Comcast (NBC, Netflix) and Verizon
(Aol, Yahoo!) can pull it off, but they can really change the game for others.

Sweden uniquely is less concerned about commercial interference with Internet
access because the Swedish government itself built and owns the enviable
universal fiber optic Internet access network there. Use of that infrastructure is
licensed to dozens of competing IT providers, and Stockholm is beginning to
resemble a Scandinavian Silicon Valley.

Elsewhere in Europe though, ISPs are in business to provide sufficient capacity
to transmit the data traffic of all their customers without “fast lanes” for some and
interruptions and buffering for everybody else. Startups in Amsterdam, Berlin,
Barcelona, Bratislava, Cyprus, Dublin, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Paris, Riga and Vienna
are among their customers. So far the Dutch are in the lead in terms of
proactively implementing the Regulation’s open Internet access provisions, which
took effect this past spring.

While BEREC properly focuses on shielding consumers from the downsides of
ISP commercial discrimination, it should also tailor its guidelines for the sake of
Europe’s tech startups looking to attract investment funding and access global
markets online. Other policymakers around the world will be watching whatever
the EU decides at the end of August about enforcement of Internet access rights.

Digital Citizens is a consumer-oriented coalition focused on educating the public and policy makers on the threats that consumers face on the internet and the importance for internet stakeholders – individuals, government and industry - to make the Web a safer place.

And while the story wasn't picked up that widely, a few news sources did pick it up and repeated the false claim that DCA is a consumer advocacy group. TorrentFreak, FedScoop and Can-India also picked up the story, and all simply repeated DCA's claim to represent the interests of "digital citizens."

But that leaves out the reality: DCA is a group mostly funded by Hollywood, but also with support from the pharmaceutical industry, to systematically attack the internet and internet companies, for failing to censor the internet and block the sites and services that Hollywood and Big Pharma dislike. DCA has been instrumental in pushing false narratives about all the "evil" things online -- "counterfeit fire detectors! fake drugs!" -- in order to push policy makers to institute new laws to censor the internet. DCA buries this basic fact in its own description, merely noting that it "counts among its supporters... the health, pharmaceutical and creative industries."

The organization was formed in late 2012, partly as a response to the MPAA's big loss around SOPA. Recognizing that it needed to change tactics, the MPAA basically helped get DCA off the ground to push scare stories about horrible internet companies enabling "bad things" online, and how new laws and policies had to be created to stop those evil internet companies. Much of this was merely speculation for a while, based on the fact that every DCA report seemed to wrongly blame internet companies for other people using those tools to do bad things online. However, it became explicit thanks to the Sony Hack, which revealed that a key part of the MPAA's anti-Google plan, dubbed Project Goliath, involved having the DCA pay Mississippi's former Attorney General Mike Moore (who mentored its current AG, Jim Hood), to lobby Jim Hood to attack Google.

That doesn't sound like a project of organizations just interested in "digital safety." It sounds like a project designed to attack internet companies. And, thus, it should be no surprise that every time DCA's name pops up, it's attacking internet companies. It was the organization that put out a report getting a variety of state Attorneys General (sense a pattern here?) to attack YouTube, because some criminals posted videos on YouTube. Rather than recognizing that this is a way to gather evidence and go after actual criminals, DCA decided that YouTube should be blamed for not taking those videos down fast enough. It was also the organization that put out a laughable report declaring the cloud storage site Mega a "haven" for piracy, where the methodology made no sense. Mega encrypts its content, but DCA and its researchers didn't seem to understand that, so they simply found a few links inbound to infringing works, and extrapolated out that a huge percentage of files on Mega were infringing.

DCA's boss, Tom Galvin, magically was chosen to present to the National Association of Attorneys General back in 2013, just months after the organization was founded, and in timing that (coincidentally, I'm sure) lines up almost exactly with the MPAA's decision (as revealed in the Sony emails) to focus on state Attorneys General to attack Google. DCA's Twitter feed regularly retweets the MPAA and various other front groups set up by the legacy copyright industries, such as the Copyright Alliance.

In short, the Digital Citizens Alliance is not an alliance of "digital citizens" at all. It's a front group set up by the MPAA and some big pharmaceutical companies to pressure policy makers into getting internet companies to censor the internet. Don't buy it.

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]]>that's not how it workshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160724/08181035052Fri, 3 Jun 2016 19:39:00 PDTPutin's Internet Trolls Mercilessly Smear Finnish Reporter Simply For Pointing Them OutKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160531/08021734580/putins-internet-trolls-mercilessly-smear-finnish-reporter-simply-pointing-them-out.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160531/08021734580/putins-internet-trolls-mercilessly-smear-finnish-reporter-simply-pointing-them-out.shtmlnumerous times now that a cornerstone of the Putin regime has been the use of internet trolls to flood the internet with propaganda. These armies of paid sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. The practice was recently exposed by journalist, activist and mother Lyuda Savchuk, who spent three months employed as such a troll -- before successfully suing the Russian government for a single ruble on principle.

Criticize this practice as a writer anywhere on the internet and you'll pretty quickly find yourself the target of anonymous attacks in the comment section -- or significantly worse. Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro recently found this out the hard way after profiling Putin's online propaganda efforts in a series of reports for Finland's state broadcaster Yle Kioski. Since the reports, Aro has found herself under attack by an ocean of internet pugilists that have filled the internet with claims Aro is everything from a professional drug dealer to a paid NATO stooge:

"In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up. At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube. “There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

...She (also) received a call late at night on her cellphone from a number in Ukraine. Nobody spoke, and all she could hear was gunfire. This was followed by text and email messages denouncing her as a “NATO whore” and a message purporting to come from her father — who died 20 years ago — saying he was “watching her.”

Finland is an EU member but has contemplated joining NATO -- talks about which accelerated after Russia's not-so-subtle invasion of the Ukraine. Russia, in turn, has started leaning heavily on its online disinformation puppets to try and turn public sentiment against such a move. Part of the effectiveness of Putin's paid trolls is that it's impossible to differentiate them from the usual wash of vitriol and idiocy that coats online interactions on any given day. As such, it's not entirely unlike trying to have a fist fight with a running stream, reflected in the Finnish media's confusion on how to tackle the problem outside of things like "open letters":

"The false claim that Ms. Aro was a drug dealer triggered an unusual open letter signed by more than 20 Finnish editors infuriated by what they denounced as the “poisoning of public debate” with “insults, defamation and outright lies.” The Finnish police began an investigation into the website for harassment and hate speech.

“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”

The European Union doesn't appear to be particularly prepared for this new world of online information warfare either, and has embraced arguably outdated concepts like "the truth" or by cataloging the most egregious claims in a weekly report dubbed the "Disinformation Review." And while disinformation and propaganda is certainly nothing new (especially here in the west), it's clear that Putin has taken online information warfare to an entirely new level. One the international community isn't quite ready for -- and is certain to respond to with no limit of bad ideas and even worse laws over time.

Full disclosure before you read about it in the comment section: I'm a former opium salesman paid by the CIA to unfairly malign absolutely everybody.

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]]>disinformation-nationhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160531/08021734580Fri, 3 Jun 2016 09:32:38 PDTInvestigation Shows GCHQ Using US Companies, NSA To Route Around Domestic Surveillance RestrictionsTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160602/17210734610/investigation-shows-gchq-using-us-companies-nsa-to-route-around-domestic-surveillance-restrictions.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160602/17210734610/investigation-shows-gchq-using-us-companies-nsa-to-route-around-domestic-surveillance-restrictions.shtml
Late last year, UK Parliament members held an "emergency debate" over the GCHQ's surveillance programs after learning that [gasp] their data and communications could be legally hoovered up as if they were mere commoners. Of course, were there any actual oversight of GCHQ's activities, this shock would have been blunted by years of foreknowledge. But the GCHQ, like other intelligence agencies, preferred to keep its overseers in the dark about its access to the NSA's PRISM firehose.

The mortified Parliament members claimed the GCHQ's decision to include them in its data haul violated a long-held "gentlemen's agreement" between the two entities -- one that had no legitimate legal basis. Supposedly, this "agreement" forbade GCHQ from targeting Parliament members for surveillance. (Any incidental collection was considered unavoidable.) A panel review found GCHQ's targeting of Parliament members to be completely legal, if a bit on the rude side.

GCHQ wouldn't normally have access to these emails as it is not supposed to be collecting information about purely domestic communications. But thanks to the software Parliament uses and the location of data centers used to route the emails, it can comply with its surveillance restrictions while still collecting email data/communications sent from UK email addresses to other UK email addresses.

Part of the process involves Microsoft's willing assistance in past domestic spying efforts, which preceded both Snowden's document dumps and its current, more combative stance.

The controversial decision by Parliament to replace its internal email and desktop office software with Microsoft’s Office 365 service in 2014, means that parliamentary data and documents constantly pass in and out of the UK to Microsoft’s datacentres in Dublin and the Netherlands, across the backbone of the internet.

Computer Weekly performed forensic analysis of emails it had received from MPs, using header info to trace its path across the internet. It found that nearly two-thirds of "domestic" emails actually left the country on their way to local email addresses, allowing GCHQ -- through its "Tempora" program -- to intercept data and communications using its NSA-provided PRISM hookup.

The NSA’s Prism system offers access to all parliamentary documents and email through Microsoft Office 365 software, as a result of secret directives given to Microsoft under controversial US 2008 surveillance laws. The directives were implemented at the same time as Microsoft was selling its cloud system, Office 365, to the Houses of Parliament.

Post-Snowden, Microsoft is far more reluctant to continue acting as Little Brother. As Computer Weekly points out, leaked documents have led to the company's hasty erection of two UK data centers in order to protect its UK users from GCHQ's exploitation of normal communication routing techniques to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance.

Microsoft isn't the only US company assisting the UK intelligence agency in its harvesting of domestic data/communications.

Computer Weekly’s investigation also confirmed that MPs’ incoming and outgoing emails are automatically scanned through a network run by MessageLabs, a subsidiary of another US corporation, Symantec, which has been contracted by Parliament to provide services including spam filtering and malware detection.

MessageLabs provides GCHQ with direct access to parliamentary emails, through a secret cyber security network called Haruspex, according to GCHQ’s “Cyber Defence Operations” legal policy instructions disclosed by Edward Snowden. The scanning system has been in operation for at least a decade.

MessageLabs scans for keywords to prevent the circulation of spam and malware. But it also can be configured to flag other terms and return those results to intelligence agencies.

Once again, officials are not amused their positions do not exclude them from GCHQ surveillance.

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson MP told Computer Weekly: “This will shock many of my parliamentary colleagues and provides a further illustration of why it is right for the government to give additional protections in law to MPs, lawyers and journalists. Theresa May has the opportunity to do this during the passage of the IP Bill in Parliament.”

There's a nice nod to a few other citizens not in elected positions contained in that statement, but there needs to be a solid, unified push from UK legislators during the debate over the Investigatory Powers Bill if this domestic surveillance loophole is going to be closed. As Computer Weekly notes, amendments have been made to the bill which prevent law enforcement agencies from accessing MPs' communications data, but that concession would not apply to GCHQ.

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]]>introducing MS Loophole 365!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160602/17210734610Wed, 1 Jun 2016 08:31:00 PDTTop Internet Companies Agree To Vague Notice & Takedown Rules For 'Hate Speech' In The EUMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160531/17513134587/top-internet-companies-agree-to-vague-notice-takedown-rules-hate-speech-eu.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160531/17513134587/top-internet-companies-agree-to-vague-notice-takedown-rules-hate-speech-eu.shtmlnot the case, and hate speech bans are more common. But, as we've noted, while it seems like a no brainer to be against hate speech, the vagueness in what counts as "hate speech" allows that term to be expanded over and over again, such that laws against hate speech are now regularly used for government censorship over the public saying things the government doesn't like.

So consider me quite concerned about the news out of the EU that the EU Commission has convinced all the big internet platform companies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft -- to agree to remove "hate speech" within 24 hours.

Upon receipt of a valid removal notification, the IT Companies to review such requests against their rules and community guidelines and where necessary national laws transposing the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA, with dedicated teams reviewing requests.

The IT Companies to review the majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content, if necessary.

In addition to the above, the IT Companies to educate and raise awareness with their users about the types of content not permitted under their rules and community guidelines. The use of the notification system could be used as a tool to do this.

In other words, it sounds a lot like these companies have agreed to a DMCA-like notice-and-takedown regime for handling "hate speech." Let's be clear here: this will be abused and it will be abused widely. That's what happens when you give individuals the ability to remove content from platforms. Obviously, these companies are private companies and can set whatever policies they want on keeping up or removing content, but when they come to an agreement with the EU Commission about what they'll remove and how quickly, reasonable concerns should be raised about how this will work in practice, what definitions will be used to determine "hate speech," what kinds of appeals processes there will be and more. And none of that is particularly clear.

And, of course, very few people will raise these issues upfront because no one wants to be seen as being in favor of hate speech. And that's the real problem. It's easy to create rules for censorship by saying it's just about "hate speech," since almost no one will stand up and complain about that. But that opens up the door to all sorts of abuse -- whether in how "hate speech" is defined, as well as in how the companies will actually handle the implementation. Two major human rights groups -- EDRi and Access Now have already withdrawn from the EU Commission forum discussing all of this in protest of how these rules were put together:

Today, on 31 May, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Access Now delivered a joint statement on the EU Commission’s “EU Internet Forum”, announcing our decision not to take part in future discussions and confirming that we do not have confidence in the ill considered “code of conduct” that was agreed.

Their main concern was that the whole thing was set up directly between the EU Commission and the internet companies behind closed doors -- and when you're talking about issues that impact human rights and freedom of expression, that needs to be done openly and transparently.

In short, the “code of conduct” downgrades the law to a second-class status, behind the “leading role” of private companies that are being asked to arbitrarily implement their terms of service. This process, established outside an accountable democratic framework, exploits unclear liability rules for companies. It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take down mechanism.

I recognize why many people may cheer on this move, thinking that it's a way to stop "bad stuff" from happening online, but beware the actual consequences of setting up an opaque process with a vague standard for pressuring platforms to censor content based on notices from angry people. If you don't think this will be abused in dangerous ways, you haven't been paying attention to the last two decades on the internet.

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]]>who-defines-what-hate-speech-ishttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160531/17513134587Fri, 27 May 2016 19:39:00 PDTThe NSA's Guide To The Internet Is The Weirdest Thing You'll Read TodayJPat Brown, Muckrockhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160527/13145434568/nsas-guide-to-internet-is-weirdest-thing-youll-read-today.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160527/13145434568/nsas-guide-to-internet-is-weirdest-thing-youll-read-today.shtml
The NSA has a well-earned reputation for being one of the tougher agencies to get records out of, making those rare FOIA wins all the sweeter. In the case of Untangling the Web, the agency's 2007 guide to internet research, the fact that the records in question just so happen to be absolutely insane are just icing on the cake - or as the guide would put it, "the nectar on the ambrosia."

Which was a bit odd, seeing as Michael had provided them in his initial request. But hey, gift horses and all that.

Now, at 650 pages, there's far too much to go into in depth here, but fortunately, as you can see from the table of contents...

you don't have to go very far before this takes a hard turn into "Dungeons and Dragons campaign/Classics major's undergraduate thesis" territory.

The preface employs a comical number of metaphors to describe what the internet is and isn't - sometimes two a paragraph. But don't take our word for it!

According to the NSA, the internet is ...

A Persian's personal library:

Sisyphus' boulder ...

A Freudian psycho-sexual pleasure palace ...

A Borgesian world-consuming knowledge-cancer ...

A labyrinth (with bonus Mino-Troll):

Two quick asides - one, in case your memory needed jogging as to what a clew was, the footnote helpfully provides that information ...

and two, before you cry foul that the beast in the center of the labyrinth is clearly a centaur, Ovid technically just describes the Minotaur as "half-man and half-bull" without specifying which half is which, so that interpretation is valid, if a bit needlessly obscure.

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]]>nectar on the ambrosiahttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160527/13145434568Thu, 26 May 2016 03:20:00 PDTEU Commission Releases Plans To More Directly Regulate Internet, Pretending It's Not Regulating The InternetMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160525/11383334545/eu-commission-releases-plans-to-more-directly-regulate-internet-pretending-not-regulating-internet.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160525/11383334545/eu-commission-releases-plans-to-more-directly-regulate-internet-pretending-not-regulating-internet.shtmlwarned you that it was likely to happen, and we helped get together folks to warn the EU Commission that this was a bad idea, but the EU Commission has always seemed dead set on a plan that they believe will hold back big successful American internet firms, while fostering support for European ones. This week they made their first move by releasing details of some of their plans. This is all part of the "Digital Single Market" plan, which, in theory, makes a ton of sense. The idea is to knock down geographical regulatory barriers on the internet, such as geoblocking. And the first part of the EU's plan is right in line with that idea and makes perfect sense. It talks about getting rid of geoblocking and also making cross-border delivery of packages easier and less expensive -- basically making e-commerce work better. That's all good.

Currently, European TV broadcasters invest around 20% of their revenues in original content and on-demand providers less than 1%. The Commission wants TV broadcasters to continue to dedicate at least half of viewing time to European works and will oblige on-demand providers to ensure at least 20% share of European content in their catalogues.

This is a silly protectionist measure that we've seen in various countries for TV for ages and it's a joke. If you want more people viewing European content have them make better content. Forcing content on people because it's "from Europe" isn't going to make anyone want to watch it if it sucks. It will also, of course, make life more difficult for new entrants who will have to make sure that enough of their content meets this arbitrary standard.

But the much more concerning stuff involves the regulation of the internet. Now, yes, the EU Commission basically tries to bend over backwards to say that this isn't about creating new regulations for the internet. And also to claim that they're not changing the "intermediary liability" regime as laid out in the E-Commerce Directive that is a decent, if unfortunately weaker, version of US intermediary liability protections, saying that platforms aren't responsible for actions of their users. But... there's a big "but" after those claims, and it basically undermines those claims. You can read the following and see them swearing no new regulations and no changes, but the four bullet points and the details buried in them suggest something entirely different:

Today's Communication on platforms does not propose a new general law on online platforms, nor does it suggest to change the liability regime set by the e-Commerce Directive.

The aim is to make sure that platforms can be created, scale up and grow in the European Union. To reach this goal we need a functioning Digital Single Market where online platforms (both startups and established market operators) are not hampered by heavy regulation.

Online platforms are already subject to EU legislation such as consumer and data protection rules, and competition law. New initiatives will only be taken to tackle any specific problems identified and only if it is established that better enforcement of existing rules is not sufficient to address these.

In our approach to online platforms, we will be guided by the following principles:

a level-playing field for comparable digital services

responsible behaviour of online platforms to protect core values,

transparency and fairness for maintaining user trust and safeguarding innovation,

open and non-discriminatory markets in a data-driven economy.

Let's go one by one. First the "level playing field." This is a popular line, but it's kind of meaningless. What does it even mean? Some companies are going to be more successful than others, or use different business models or strategies. And those, by their very nature, create a different kind of playing field. We should be worried when the government is arguing for tilting the playing field one way or the other. For example, in earlier discussions about this, there were arguments that YouTube's model was unfair, but Spotify's model was fine. Why should the government favor one over the other?

Also, within the details, they make it clear that, despite what was said above, this is about extending new censorship regulations to platforms. "Data protection" regulations include things like "the right to be forgotten." Recognize that when reading this:

In the new e-Privacy Directive the Commission will consider, for example, extending data protection obligations currently applicable only to telecoms companies to platforms.

The next one is the big concern, because it's so... broad: "Ensuring that online platforms behave responsibly." What does that mean? Who determines what's "responsible?" Because you have the RIAA and MPAA insisting that "responsible" means vast censorship of platforms to block anything that might even remotely be infringing. Or you have the FBI insisting that "responsible" means keeping log files for a really long time and not encrypting stuff (or encrypting it with holes in it). There's a lot of wiggle room within "behaving responsibly" that should be a cause for concern.

And, indeed, it looks like the EU Commission is buying the MPAA/RIAA's view of what "behaving responsibly" means:

In the third quarter of 2016, the Commission will propose a copyright reform package aiming to achieve a fairer allocation of value generated by the online distribution of copyright-protected content by online platforms providing access to such content.

This is a fairly loud dog whistle to the RIAA. In the past few months the RIAA has been going on and on about what they're ridiculously calling the "value gap" in online platforms. In short that "value gap" is that internet companies are making lots of money... while record labels are not. To them, that's because of some sort of unfairness in the law. To most everyone else it's because the markets have shifted, and the record labels failed to adapt. And, really, if we're talking about unfair markets and "fair allocation of value" why didn't anyone complain through the 70s, 80s and 90s when the laws were so tilted that the labels basically got all of the "allocation of value" while the actual artists got stiffed?

And, of course, despite the EU Commission initially saying that there would be no impact on the intermediary liability protections in the E-Commerce Directive, they pretty quickly walk that back in the details:

In relation to the liability regime of online intermediaries established by the e-Commerce Directive, the Commission will assess:

the need for guidance on the liability of online platforms when putting in place voluntary measures to fight illegal content online [starting in the second half of 2016], and

the need for a formal notice-and-action procedures [after taking due account of the updated audiovisual media and copyright frameworks].

Got that? So now the government will be pushing for "voluntary measures" to take down content. But since it's the government looking into it, it's not so voluntary, is it? And then a "notice and action procedure" which means "notice and takedown." In the US, obviously, we have that for copyright, which has created a massive censorship regime, but we don't have such a setup for other kinds of content. The EU, generally, does have a sort of notice-and-takedown for things like defamation, and it looks like that may expand.

Oh, and then the ever amorphous censorship of "hate speech," which no one ever seems to define clearly:

In addition to revised audiovisual media rules, the Commission will further encourage coordinated EU-wide self-regulatory efforts by online platforms in tackling illegal content online. The Commission is currently discussing with IT companies on a code of conduct on combatting hate speech online.

Sure, I dislike hate speech as much as the next guy, but attempts to suppress hate speech tend to lead to straight up government censorship or as a way to attack speech governments don't like.

Next up, we've got: "Fostering trust, transparency and ensuring fairness." Yup, there's that "fairness" again. Obviously, fostering trust and transparency are actually things I'm very, very supportive of. But I'm not clear on what the government needs to be doing here, when there are often good ways for the market to do that itself. Companies that are more transparent generate more trust by themselves. And many new platforms rely on public trust to actually provide any value. So, sure, I don't want fake reviews online either, but isn't that something that platforms can handle by themselves?

The Commission will encourage industry to step up voluntary efforts, which it will help in framing, to prevent trust-diminishing practices (in particular, but not limited to, tackling fake or misleading online reviews) and monitor the implementation of the self-regulatory principles agreed on comparison websites and apps.

So, while we applaud the idea of doing away with geoblocking, as well as the general principles of fairness, trust and transparency, it's extremely frightening to think about what the government has to do in this arena at all, since almost all of the suggested ideas are wide open to abuse in the form of just attacking platforms the government or legacy industries don't like, rather than focusing on what actually creates the most value for the public.